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I purchased a mid range mini a Qaud 2.3 with just a 1tb hdd. I added a samsung 830 512gb ssd as the second drive. If you put the ssd in with no format and boot with an external drive you then go to disk utility the internal ssd and internal hdd are highlighted in red. The disk utility sees it as a broken fusion answer yes to fix it and in under a minute you have a 1.5tb fusion. then do an internet recovery to load mountain lion and you have a standalone mac mini with a killer 1.5tb fusion. Everything you mention in your tests(about the ssd being taxed) is less true basically because the ssd is huge and in a 1 to 2 ratio with the hdd. This is the closest I have come to a 1.5 tb ssd.

I copied a 500gb eyetv folder with 30 18gb recordings easy peasy. So if you have a 2012 or even a 2011 mac mini and mountain lion just add a big ssd and fusion away.Reply

I am with you on this one. Fusion drive with a higher SSD to HDD ratio nets huge gains in snappiness and overall SSD-ness of the fusion drive. I have only encountered IO slowdown once or maybe twice in the 2 months I've been running with Fusion.Reply

I DID IT on a late 2008 macbbok ;-P 250GB Samsung 840 with a WD Blue 640GB HDD its been in a fusion for about 3 months now and runs beautifully... its basically a media server for me and my wife and it never slacks on its duties!!! its snappy switching profiles and logging in and out... wifey uses safari and flash games and what not and i never hear her complain anymore about her slack windows computer... i use it for heavy downloading light gaming and media server. Mr_SkoT_A Just installed i did the fusion setup which was fairly easy, except i used a specific number and got a 860GB drive instead of using a "100%" value to create the (correct amount) 890GB drive so i have 30GB of my drive in fusion limbo right now... all in all i love it the samsung drive was a smart buy i would love to hear from someone who runs with like a 60gb SSD and a 1TB HDD would be nice to know how much money i could have savedReply

Did you fusion drive, from recovery Disk Utility as "I purchased a mid range mini a Qaud 2.3 with just a 1tb hdd. I added a samsung 830 512gb ssd as the second drive. If you put the ssd in with no format and boot with an external drive you then go to disk utility the internal ssd and internal hdd are highlighted in red. The disk utility sees it as a broken fusion answer yes to fix it and in under a minute you have a 1.5tb fusion. then do an internet recovery to load mountain lion and you have a standalone mac mini with a killer 1.5tb fusion. Everything you mention in your tests(about the ssd being taxed) is less true basically because the ssd is huge and in a 1 to 2 ratio with the hdd. This is the closest I have come to a 1.5 tb ssd." said in the previous comment, or did you do it by terminal? Because as far as i know, i can't seem to fusion without terminal in diskuttil? Reply

Hello...can you please clarify regarding booking from an external drive? So you're saying you just installed a ssd you purchased into the machine in addition to the HDD that it came with and disk utility automatically created the fusion? did you need any extra parts to install the ssd? Anything you could tell me would be appreciated. I just purchased the Quad 2.3 Mini as well. Thank you for your time :-)Reply

I just had my original iMac (recent (not the newest) model with a 2.93 GHz Core i7, now running Mavericks) hard drive replaced with a larger one. I had a 512 SSD installed at the same time, which was formatted and ready to use when i got it back. Is there a way to do the manuver you describe above with Disk Utility now that has already been formatted? Reply

Hej, would this method work on a macbook pro 2011 version? Or is it only exclusive for Mac Mini? Because i can start a recovery HD from the internet, by holding option command and R, and how will i not format it ? IF it is already is formated The ssd how can not format it? Reply

So, after I read up on core storage, I rolled a fusion drive in my 2011 macbook pro 13", using a 240GB SSD (sand force controller) and the stock 320GB HDD. (I removed the optical drive. Stupid optical drive...) It honestly feels like a 550GB SSD. Then again, My ratio of SSD to HDD is 3:4, so as always, YMMV.Reply

Yes, technically I think it's more similar to a JBOD configuration, but the reliability should be the same...IMHO Fusion Drive is good for noobs, but I'd rather choose which files should be stored in the flash drive and which ones in the mechanical drive, know about the free space in each disk, so I'd prefer a 128GB SSD and, separately, a 1TB hard disk to a 1.1TB Fusion Drive.Reply

I think drive configurations like this are really needed. Maybe not for you and I, but for 99.5% of people. Even people who aren't really "noobs".

As an example, I purchased a 120GB SSD for a family member who is reasonably good with computers. It breathed new life into a 3 year old computer and was really noticed and appreciated. One year later, the whole thing was a disaster! There are documents, music, videos, etc all over the place. Usually 2 or 3 copies of the same files on both the SSD and the hard drive. Both nearly full. It took several hours to fix the mess.

Bottom line: Most people can't, aren't willing, or aren't well-organized enough to keep files segregated between drives. Even people who you probably think would be able to handle it by virtue of being reasonably computer literate.Reply

I agree. I'm currently all SSD in my work laptop, but going the manual hybrid route in my home computer. Although I'm pretty organized, it is a pain to mov stuff around manually between the drives. For 2 of my kids computers, I just went with Seagate Momentus XT drives, and they've been great. Not as good as SSD, but a fraction of the cost.Reply

On my RAID-0 SSD + 1TB hard drive configuration, I installed Windows 7 in a way that all the profile folders (Users and ProgramData) existed on the hard drive by default, and created NTFS junctions on the SSD to redirect any old software. I never even needed to open the C Drive anymore, and all files and desktop settings reside on the hard drive automatically.

For older machines XP should support junctions as well.

Now filling up the drive, that's a different story. And let me guess, the browser got filled up with toolbars too?Reply

Fusion drive is even easier to use than that though and it speeds up all of your programs and files as well as it can with the SSD size given. With a setup like that there are always going to be things on the HDD that get used regularly and they will never see a boost from the SSD. There is the upside of better reliability but outside that boosting 120GB or 240GB of the most accessed files seems even better than permanent segregation.Reply

I have manual HD/SSD combinations in my desktop and laptop, have done the same for three PCs I've built for family and have similar setup for nearly every workstation at work. It seems that some users are naturally much better than others at handling their file storage, but I think it's invaluable for people to get good at organising the data systematically and consciously rather than to leave it up to an algorithm that might not have the same priorities.

I don't like the sounds of every file being written to my SSD then moved to the HDD - I'd get through write cycles for no good reason whenever copying a file to that hybrid drive, and if my HDD doesn't have redundancy I'd feel safer with my important docs on the SSD, even if they're not deemed worthy of the speed boost.Reply

Couldn't you just put the "Pictures", "Music", and "Videos" libraries on the hard drive and keep the documents and everything else on the solid state drive? Seems to me like that would work for 99% of people and not require any user thought... So you have a video, you save it in the "Videos" location, etc, and these files would see very little difference being on the HDD vs SSD.Reply

Yeah, me too. Like my shows from my Tivo are obviously GIGAAAANTIC and don't NEED to have fast access to them. Ditto (even more so) for any music or iTunes stuff. It's not like it's THAT hard to figure out what to put where, but yeah, the average person unfortunately would probably be clueless about it.Reply

It's not so hard if you can get away with just moving your music/videos/images to the HDD. It's much harder if the data you work with is absolutely massive, though.

One artist I know has a SSD as their boot drive, and 3 HDDs. The PSDs they work with are absolutely massive, and they produce a huge number of them. Working with them on the SSD is far better than the HDDs, but even loading them on that is a bit on the slow side (as opposed to the multi-minute loads from an HDD). But, they have far too many to fit on the SSD.

So they have the PSDs spread over the 4 drives, filling most of them up, having to manually shuffle them around. Something like Fusion Drive would work far better, as it would be doing exactly what she's doing, just without the manual effort to constantly move old files off the SSD (resulting in multiple hierarchies). The older PSDs would be migrated to the HDDs automatically. And if she starts working on an old set again, they could be promoted back to the SSD... with no user effort.

And isn't that the point of computers? To make us do less work? It seems a lot of people want to do the jobs of a computer for them. While I'd prefer Fusion Drive to let you pin/hint files to certain drives, I'd say in most cases a 2 drive set up doesn't actually provide real world benefit over an intelligent (which I'm assuming Fusion Drive is) tiering system, even for most power users.Reply

Yes, exactly. This is the point of computers. It always bothers me when self-proclaimed experts come on tech sites dismissing anything of the sort. I can imagine them saying " Well just do RAID, or just manage the files yourself" and then stating that such a solution as this as unnecessary, when they clearly don't understand the point. They only work to slow such efforts down. Reply

If your friend has a mac, and if they can borrow enough temporary storage (to copy and hold the files while you make the change over), what I would recommend is that they stripe their 3 HDs together as a single volume. This can be done easily enough using the Disk Utility GUI.(Honestly they should have enough temporary storage anyway, in the form of Time Machine backup).

This will give a single volume (less moving around from one place to another) with 3x the bandwidth (as long as each hard drive is connected to a distinct USB or FW port).

[If the drives are of different sizes, and you don't want to waste the extra space, it is still possible to use them this way, but you will need to use the command line. Assume you have two drives, one of 300GB, one of 400GB --- the extension to more drives is obvious.You partition the 400GB drive as a 300GB and 100GB partition.You then(a) create a striped RAID from the 300GB drive and the 300GB partition(b) convert the 100GB partition to a (single-drive) concatenated RAID volume [this step is not obviously necessary but is key](c) create a concatenated volume from the volume created in (a) and that created in (b).This will give you 600GB of striped storage, plus 100GB at the end of slower non-striped storage. Can't complain.]

Not a perfect solution, but a substantial improvement on the situation right now.

I don't know the state of the art for SW RAID built into Windows so I can't comment on that.Reply

Manually managing your SSD/HD resources allows you to speed up based exactly on your own priorities, instead of having some software guessing and making a bunch of unnecessary copies to/from the SSD/HD.

You get faster performance of pure SSD where you want it. Less hiccups from background reorganization, and less unnecessary stressing of the SSD.

Also it isn't exactly difficult to manage manually. Use the SSD for your main OS/Application drive and whatever else you deem important for speed up.Reply

Apple's principal market, especially for the iMac, is to home and small business users. Once again dragging out the familiar, but still applicable, automotive metaphor, I'll point out that most people don't want to work on their cars. They just want to drive reliably to wherever they're going. That's the need that Apple's FD addresses, and it seems to do so rather well.

Sure, the price adder is a bit higher than one might hope, but probably not so much that it'll frighten away prospective buyers.

Interestingly though, it lost our sale. I was ready to order another iMac with a 256GB SSD and a 1TB HD for the office. We keep most of the files on the server, but a 128GB SSD application/boot drive is a bit tight. However a 256GB SSD is just right, allowing plenty of free space to maintain SSD performance. The additional 1TB HD is then repurposed for local Time machine backup.

But that's not an option for the new iMac, which offers only HD or FD. And I'm not about to make a risky and warranty busting expedition into its innards in order to roll my own SSD solution (although my own MacBook Pro has a self-installed 512GB SSD).

Instead I ordered up a 256GB SSD Mac mini, plus what turned out to be a very nice 24" 16:10 IPS monitor from HP. Although I would have preferred the all-in-one iMac solution for a cleaner installation without gratuitously trailing cables, the Mac mini with SSD, i7 and 8GB RAM options is fast and effective.Reply

Wasn't this the kind of thing said about virtual memory in the 60's and 70's? Some people back then thought manually managing the location of everything in memory would make things more efficient, until some guys at IBM (or was it Bell Labs?) showed you saved heck of a lot more time letting the machine do it instead of trying to move things around yourself.

This Fusion Drive really does reminds me of virtual memory. RAM and HDD mapped in a way so it appears as a single type of memory. Most stuff gets placed into RAM first, some stuff spills over onto the HDD, and stuff gets copied back and forth depending on how frequently it's used. The fast RAM is first priority, but there's the HDD as kind of a backup.

It's a bit different from a caching setup, where the computer has to "guess" a bit more about what should really be on the SSD. It's like the HDD is priority here, while the SSD is secondary.

And just like with virtual memory, none of this would matter if you had a huge amount of RAM or a very large SSD.Reply

To all those "experts" who claim that it's better to manage it yourself, you can also write every program in ASM. It'll be fast and small, but I'll be done with the project in 1/10 the time. The point is .... the product is not meant to provide "absolutely the best possible configuration". It's meant to be best all around solution.

If you guys still don't get it. Well, I guess all these years in the education didn't really help you because logical people think rationally.Reply

A month ago, I would have said the same thing, but see my other post to understand why more people need this than you think. The proportion of people who can handle manually segregating their files is much, much smaller than most of us realize. I have three systems setup with both an SSD and a HDD and have no troubles. But we are a tiny, tiny minority of users.Reply

I'm 40+ years old; I still know x86 assembly language and use Ethernet and IP protocol analyzers frequently. I'm fluent in god-knows how many programming languages and build my own desktops. I know perfectly well how to manage storage.

But why would I *want* to? I have a demanding day job in the technology field. I have a couple of hobbies outside of computers and am just generally very, very busy. If I can pay Apple (or anyone) a few hundred bucks to get 90% of the benefit I'd see from spending several hours a year doing this... why in the world would I want to do it myself?

The intersection of people who have the technical knowledge to manage their own SSD/HD setup, people who have the time to do it, and people who have the interest in doing it is *incredibly* tiny. Probably every single one of them is in this thread :)Reply

I wonder how you organize stuff right now? Even before I had more than one HDD I still had multiple partitions (one for system and one for media at the time), so that I could reinstall windows without having my media touched. And that media partition was segregated into photos, music, movies, documents etc. That is how I organize my files and know where what is located.I don't see any change to my behaviour with an SSD functioning as my system partition and the HDDs functioning as media partitions.Do people just put everything on the desktop? How do you find anything? I just don't understand this at all.Reply

Do you not have any type of file that's both large, numerous, and demands high performance?

I regularly work with Virtual Machines, with each of them usually being around 10 Gb (some being as small as 2, with the largest closer to 60). I have far too many to fit on my machine's SSD, but they're also /far/ faster when run from it.

So what do I have to do? I have to break my nice, clean hierarchy. I have a folder both on my SSD and on my eSATA RAID for them. The ones I'm actively working with the most I keep on the SSD, and the ones I'm not actively using on the HDD. Which means I also have to regularly move the VMs between the disks. This is /far/ from an ideal situation. It means I never know /exactly/ where any given VM is at any given moment.

On the other hand, it sounds like a Fusion Drive set up could handle the situation far better. If I hadn't worked with a VM in a while, there would be an initial slowdown, but eventually the most used parts would be promoted to the SSD (how fast depend on implementation details), resulting in very fast access. Also, since it isn't on a per-file level, the parts of the VM's drive that are rarely/never accessed won't be wasting space on the SSD... potentially allowing me to store more VMs on the SSD at any given moment, resulting in better performance.

So I have potentially better performance over all (either way, I doubt it's too far from a manual set up), zero maintenance overhead of shuffling files around, and not having to destroy my clean hierarchy (symlinks would mean more work for me and potentially more confusion).

VMs aren't the only thing I've done this way. Some apps I virtually never use I've moved over (breaking that hierarchy). I might have to start doing this with more things in the future.

Let me ask you this: Why do you think you'd do a better job managing the data than a computer? It should have no trouble figuring out what files are rarely accessed, and what are constantly accessed... and can move them around easier than you (do you plan on symlinking individual files? what about chunks of files?).Reply

Since I don't use my computer for any work, I don't have large files I need frequent access to.How many of those VMs do you have? How big is your current SSD?Adding the ability for FD adds 250 to 400USD which is enough for another 250 to 500GB SSD, would that be enough for all your data?If you are doing serious work on the PC, I don't understand why you can't justify buying a bigger SSD. It's a business expense, so it's not as expensive as it is for consumers and the time you save will mean a better productivity.The negatives of this setup in my opinion:I don't know which physical location my files have, so I cannot easily upgrade one of the drives. I also don't know what happens if one of the drives fail, do I need to replace both and lose all the data? It introduces more complexity to the system which is never good.Performance may be up for some situations, but it will obviously never rival real SSD speeds. And as Anand showed in this little test, some precious SSD space was wasted on video files. There will be inefficiencies. Though they might get better over time. But then again, so will SSD pricing.As for your last point: Many OSes still don't use their RAM very well, so I'm not so sure I want to trust them with my SSD space. I do envision a future where there will be 32 to 256GB of high speed NAND on mainboards which will be addressed in a similar fashion to RAM and then people add SSDs/HDDs on top of that.Reply

Currently, 10 VMs, totally approximately 130 GBs. My SSD is only 128 GB. Even if I'd sprung for a 500 GB model (which would have cost closer to $1,000 at the time), I'd have still needed a second HDD to store all my data, most of which would work fine on a traditional rust bucket, as they're not bound by the disk's transfer speed (they're bound by humans... i.e. the playback speed of music/video files).

Also, for any data stored on the SSD by the fusion drive, it wouldn't just "rival" SSD speeds, it would /be/ SSD speeds.

I'm also not sure what your comment about RAM is about... Operating Systems do a very good job managing RAM, trying to keep as much of it occupied with something as possible (which includes caching files). There are extreme cases where it's less than ideal, but if you think it'd be a net-win for memory to be manually managed by the user, you're nuts.

If one of the drives fail, you'd just replace that, and then restore from a backup (which should be pretty trivial for any machine running OSX, thanks to TimeMachine's automatic backups)... the same as if a RAID 0 array failed. Same if you want to upgrade one of the drives.Reply

Oh and btw.: I think this is still a far better product than any Windows SSD caching I've seen. And if you can use it like the 2 people who made the first comments, great. But getting it directly from Apple makes it less appealing with the current options.Reply

Lol exactly! When I was a student and had loads of free time, I built my own pcs and overclocked them (Celeron 300a FTW!) but over the years, I really don't have the time anymore to tinker constantly and find myself using Macs increasingly now, booting into Windows whenever I need to use Visual Studio. Yes they are more expensive, but they are very nicely designed and powerful (assuming money is no limiter)Reply

"The proportion of people who can handle manually segregating their files is much, much smaller than most of us realize"

I agreed with your post, but it always astounds me that commenters in articles like these need occasional reminders that the real world exists, and no, people don't care about obsessive, esoteric ways to deal with technological minutiae. Reply

Anybody else getting a bit of déjà vu? I recently saw a rehash of the compiler-vs-assembly (or perhaps, trick-playing to work around compiler-optimization bugs); the early comment was K&P, 1976.

Yes, anybody who knows what they're doing, and is willing to spend the time, can hand-tune a machine/storage system, better than a general-purpose algorithm. *I* have the combo SSD + spinner approach in my laptop, but would have saved myself MANY hours of fussing and frustration, had a good Fusion-type solution been available.

It'd be interesting to see how much time Anand thinks a person of his skill and general experience, would take to install, configure and tune a SSD+spinner combo, versus the time he'd save per month from the somewhat better results vis-à-vis a Fusion drive. As a very rough SWAG, I'll guess that the payback for an expert, heavy user is probably around 2–3 years, an up-front sunk cost that won't pay back because it'll be necessary to repeat with a NEW machine before the time.Reply

But then you end up with a SSD filled up with no longer relevant data and you need to figure out how to free up space again. A combo drive takes care of that for you and keeps the SSD filled to the brim with most of the data that gets used. You can download any games, start any big video editing project, and know that you are getting 50%-100% of the benefit of the SSD without worrying about managing segregated data. With a segregated setup you end up playing games from the HDD or editing video files that are on the HDD and sometimes see 0% of the benefit of the SSD. Fusion seems like the future.Reply

If you can divide your data up as OS, Apps, and Media, and OS + Apps fits on the SSD, then sure, it's not too bad.

Unfortunately, my Steam library is approximately 250 GBs... That alone would fill up most SSDs out there. And that's not even counting all my non-Steam games, which would help push most any SSD towards being totally full. If I'd bought too many recent games, it'd likely be quite a bit larger than that (AAA games seem to be ranging from 10-30 GBs these days).

Unless you sprung for a 500 GB SSD (which aren't exactly cheap, even today), you'd be having quite a pickle on your hands. Likely having to move most of the library manually to the HDD (which is a bit of a pain with Steam). Which means it's suddenly much more complicated than OS/Apps on SSD, and Media on the HDD. Especially since SSDs massively improve the load time of large games (unlike the impact it has on media).

And then there's the other examples I've already given: the artist I know that works on absurdly massive PSDs, and has many terabytes of them (what's the point of a SSD if it doesn't benefit your primary usage of a computer?), as well as my situation with VMs on my non-gaming machine (which actually has a SSD + HDD setup right now). A lot of people could probably do the divide you're talking about, but likely even more people could fit all their data in either a 128 or 256 GB SSD.Reply

Intel SRT is useful for everyone, there's no reason to look down on it. Could I sit there and manually move files back and forth between the SSD and HD? Sure. But why? Seriously, I have better things to do with my time then move around the program of the week between storage mediums. Last week I was using Metro 2033, this week is World of Tanks. Next week I might finish one of those run throughs of D:HR or Portal 2 that I left hanging. SRT takes care of all of that. This is 2013, an enthusiast class workstation should damn well be able to handle something as simple as caching, and it can. Enterprise class servers have been doing it for some time, so why isn't it good enough for a gameing rig?

My one complaint with RST is the cache size limit. Why would Intel even impose a limit?Reply

You're framing it in your own way so that only your solution works. Fail. Unnecessary stressing of the SSD? The better argument for most people would be putting that SSD to good use. Not trying to NOT use it.

It further isn't simply about putting the files where they go, and then be done with. Files are changed, updated, and if you're on multiple drives, copied back and forth. Some people don't want to deal with that. Actually, no one should want to do deal with that. There are only barriers with every person having their own thresholds to good solutions. Is it that hard to understand? Reply

Do you manually control the data in the 1st, 2nd level cache in your CPU too? There are plenty of decent caching algorithms created by very smart people. If the algorithms were that bad your CPU would be running very slow.

There should be no need for you to WASTE TIME moving crap around from drive to drive. The OS can know how often you use stuff, and whether the accesses are sequential, random, slow.

If Windows 8's Storage Spaces was more like Fusion Drive out of the box (or better even), us geeks would be more impressed by Windows 8.Reply

Having designed and built both computers and operating systems, I qualify as not naive. I'm interested in your assertion, therefore, that because I prefer letting the Fusion drive do the work that I must be lazy. You're making a judgement about how I should spend my time - that it's the best investment of my time to shuffle files about (non-trivial if I want the level of granularity a Fusion drive can offer, too) versus developing software or playing with my dog. It's interesting that you think you know me that well, regardless of the fact you're dead wrong.

You can get twice the SSD storage, and 3 times the HDD storage, for about the Apple price. This will take up more physical space, but also offer you way more storage space, both on the SSD side (plenty of space for your OS, apps, and live data files) and HDD space (3TB + 3TB backup, or 6TB JBOD for your archives and media)Reply

Thanks for pointing this out! I was very interested in getting a new iMac, as I love working on my 13" rMBP, but since I still like to game I really wanted to use the SSD on bootcamp as well. It is a huge step backward for all those people who want/need bigger SSDs. The only other option Apple offers is the 768 GB version for a whopping 1300€ upgrade price. There is no other size in between. Apple has lost me on that one.Reply

Again I have to wonder what you do with your PC. It appears as though you have no idea what is on your PC, because even saving a .doc in a specific folder is "managing files". Do you just save everything to desktop? Or download everything from the cloud and then start it from the browser download window?Reply

And I wonder if you have EVER actually(a) viewed how NORMAL people use computers,(b) used a Mac more recently than ten years ago.

Apple realized a long time ago that people has MASSIVE difficulty dealing with the file system and naming/finding files. Practically every large advance in Apple tech has been to deal with this.

iTunes and iPhoto are about dealing with "songs" and "photos", not "song files" and "photo files". Both create an environment where you never have to give a damn about where your songs and photos are stored or named in the file system. iPod follows the same path, and iOS is the logical endpoint, with no user visible file system.And this is not new --- did you EVER expect that you should have to manually organized your email files into folders?

In OSX Apple first tried to simplify things with automatically provided folders for the most common situations (Documents, Downloads, Music, Movies, Pictures).Now, in Mountain Lion Apple is, through a combination of different features (version storage, automatically opening apps at reboot, auto-storing files in iCloud) trying to make it so that, more and more you don't have to name documents created in apps like TextEdit. You CAN, but you don't HAVE TO.

Insisting on manually controlling the placement of your files really does start to come across as no different from insisting on writing assembly code.

Look, I'm not an idiot. I have multiple external hard drives connected to my multiple machines, and I have a purpose for the different hard drives.The difference between you and me is that I'm not so deluded as to imagine that my needs are in any way typical, and that everyone else would be better off being forced to do things like me.Reply

I see how other people use PCs. They are managing their stuff, even if they just put documents in a document folder, photos in a photo folder etc. I don't even know what not managing files would look like. Hence why I asked.I don't use Apple products.I manually organize my Emails to folders in Thunderbird.I also don't use the Windows libraries or the media player library or any of that stuff. I have no found a program that gave me the ability to organize "non-files" (songs, photos etc.) in a way I found easy to use, well arranged etc. I also like my files to be program/OS independent.I don't think I'm the typical user. I never said as much.

Your last point though tells me that you don't understand the meaning of my post here. Read the other post that I did not replying to anyone. That should make it clear that I am against this technology. But if someone says he is not managing files, that just sounds dumb (real world equivalent: I don't clean up my closet and have no idea where what is).Reply

People who do the simplest management of their files (saving photos to a Photos folder, music to a Music folder, etc.) have "low-level autism"?

The argument that basic file management is hard or a "headache" is absurd. It takes no time at all, and managing files and apps between an SSD and an HDD is no more difficult or time consuming than that.Reply

It isn't about lack of technical knowledge, it is about lack of EMPATHY.

Just because you or I or anyone around here can manually manage things doesn't mean that we should bash on automated solutions for normals. I used to write custom config.sys and batch files to get my DOS games to run properly 20 years ago, but I did it because I wanted to play the game, not because I enjoyed jumping through technical hoops.

I'm sure if you told some nerd back in 1993 that maintenance of their games from both the download service and the operating system would be the norm in 20 years, they'd bash on it for not being "hardcore" enough.

Jumping through technical hoops is nothing, you're right, its easy. It also isn't something to hold over the heads of people who don't want to go through that work.

Again, empathy, something so many insecure tech geeks are lacking when it comes to thinking about technology and products.Reply

Apple isn't gauging 150$. They are charging you 250€ for a 128 GB SSD! 250€ = 333$ at the current rate. Not to mention the fact, they simply don't have anything in between. It's either 128GB SSD or 766GB.I'm not sure why everybody is so apologetic about Apple on this one. They gave you much better option on last years models. They actually took options away. While I could deal with a lot of the "anti-consumer" moves that Apple has made late, this is just over the top. The new iMac is nothing more but a bigger Notebook and hence has completely lost it's value as a desktop machine.

Oh and please: How hard is it to manage files? 256 GB is fine for all my files (programs + games). Games I don't play I simply deinstall from Steam. I have a VDSL 50.000 line here, so redownloading them is a no brainer. Same goes for other programs. It must be an American problem with slow inter connections...

Also the way iPhoto handles files is extremely awkward: It actually creates a second copy of the file in another folder. That might me elegant on the surface, but I see absolutely no advantage over simply having a nice hierarchal folder structure. In fact that's what iTunes superbly does. It is a big bag of hurt, that Apple is inconsistent with the way they manage files!Reply

It looks better than I thought. I'm still not going to use it myself (Windows/Linux user here and I have no trouble managing more than one partition). But it seems better than the usual Windows caching solutions. Still, the non-technical people I know don't need more than a few hundred GB of space on their PC and no one has more than one HDD in their PC anyway. So the easiest way for them (which is what I always recommend) is to have a 256GB SSD and an external 1 to 3TB drive. All their work is on the SSD with daily/weekly backups and photos are on their external HDD (none of those people use the PC to view movies).Reply

If you write a huge file, it all gets written to the SSD up to 117GB. But that SSD is filled with other stuff. Won't it be limited by the speed it transfers the old things to the hard drive? How does that work if the files aren't mirrored? Reply

Apple still lists the 3TB Fusion drive as incompatible with Boot Camp "at this time". Presumably this is due to how Apple is doing the BIOS emulation with EFI 1.10 and running into the 2.2TB drive size limit. Have you heard any methods to get 3TB Fusion working with Boot Camp or heard whether Apple has a solution in the works?Reply

Just curious, I think that's how Readyboost worked. You would have a flash drive immediately start sending data slowly to your computer while the hard drive took its time to seek the larger chunks of data. So I wonder if there is a large queue of data for a Fusion drive to read, it will read from both drives concurrently? Reply

The iPod nano1 came in sizes of 1, 2, 4GBThe 2nd gen came as 2, 4, 8GB.3rd were 4, 8GB4th was 4,8, 16GB.All at essentially the same retail price.

Apple has showed consistent pattern (you also see it in the shuffle, or in iPod Touch), of doubling the storage until they hit a point which seems to cover almost everyone's needs. Then there is a year or two of stasis, then a new product category which requires more storage.

Next time you want to post blatant nonsense, try to remember that on the internet people WILL call you out when you state bullshit.Reply

Feeling self-important today? Yes, that's what I mean, there hasn't been a doubling since the fourth generation Nano. Or does "Been a long time since a capacity doubling from them" mean "they have never ever doubled capacity" in your little world? Reply

As compared to all those other tablets out there with 128 and 256GB of storage? Like uuh, huh, wait, the names will come to me...

When EVERYONE is doing things a certain way, not just Apple, it may be worth asking if there are other issues going on here (limited manufacturing capacity and exploding demand, for one) rather than immediately assuming Apple is out to screw you.Reply

Seriously though why in blazes are HDD manufacturers having such a hard time with this. How hard is it just to throw 4GB of SLC onto the little circuit board of a 1TB HDD? Yes, all you need is 4GB. The controller simply needs to perform a very simple algorithm... If the file you are writing is greater than 4MB in size, write directly to the HDD. It is a large sequential write and thus HDD performance will be adequate. If its a small write (< 4MB), write that to the SLC cache. That one tiny little optimization will get you 90% of the performance of a Vertex 4. (Depending on the bandwidth of this 4GB of SLC of course). But really it doesnt need to be as fast as a vertex 4. It just needs to be in that ballpark, for small random I/O. Large sequential I/O can just skip the NAND altogether.Reply

Yeah, and USING Momentus XT sucks. The experience is horribly uneven.Enough stuff comes up fast that you get used to that, but enough stuff comes up slowly that it's REALLY noticeable because you're used to the occasional bursts of speed.

I've used Momentus, I've used Fusion. There is no comparison.

In fact (true story) after I replaced the broken HD in a friend's MacBook Pro with a Momentus she told me a week later that she thought the computer was still broken because it seemed to behave so strangely, sometimes feeling really fast, then a little later feeling so slow.

Now, if Momentus were kitted out with- 64GB (maybe even just 32GB) of- FAST flash (not the cheap crap used in USB thumb drives) AND- cached writesit might work well. But that's not the product that Seagate is selling.Reply

Because there's a lot more to it than just using the right NAND. Also, for the 2nd-gen Momentus XT they were going to release a firmware update that would enable write caching. I'm not sure if that ever happened, haven't followed up on it recently.Reply

How would the HDD know what is a file? The OS will just command a drive to write a given data block to Sector X.

The drive may treat X as a logical address, and reorder data internally, but it has no clue if it is writing a complete file or parts of it, or just writing zeros as ordered by some secure erase software.Reply

Any word on how much the migration process increases read/write quantity over a manually managed setup? As for ssd life being longer than hdd life, if we take into account that almost all writes will hit the ssd first and then some will transfer to the hdd this means the hdd is accessed less often. This could level the mean read/write to failure rate to make the hdd even with the ssd, unless migration has an effect that I'm not considering.Reply

For me, the biggest problem is the added difficulty of doing an upgrade or replacement of storage if it starts getting full or goes bad. From what I've read, the only option is to do a full backup, replace one of the disks, and then do a full restore. I have an '11 MBP with SSD and the DVD replaced with a large HD, so I could, in theory move to a Fusion drive, but it just seems like a risky and annoying proposition. Reply

Simply make one last Time Machine backup before the drive switch, then restore from Time Machine afterwards.

Done.

That's even the process when switching to a completely new Mac – in my case I once even switched machines, architectures and OS versions all in one go, from a PowerMac G5 running Leopard to an Intel iMac under Snow Leopard. Completely painless and everything was still there exactly where and as it was on the old machine, down to the last application preference and to the last document.

You should have an up-to-date Time Machine backup at all times anyway, not least because it is so incredibly easy to maintain.

One of the huge advantages of Fusion Drive is that I will be able to build in an additional SSD into my Late 2009 iMac, fuse it with the regular HD and then restore the Time Machine backup to the fused drives exactly and with zero changes to the directory structure, reconnecting the new copy to the Time Machine history so that every directory will retain its full backup history right back to 2008 while still auto-optimizing performance.

That is as close to perfect as it gets.

That they initially charge a few bucks (or Euro) for the added speed, capacity and convenience is perfectly reasonable in my view (I'll get it for free beyond the third-party SSD and some time spent on modifying it myself).Reply

" I’m personally a much bigger fan of going all solid state and manually segmenting your large media files onto HDD arrays, but perhaps that’s me being set in my ways (or just me being right, not sure which one)."

I don't want to complain, Anand, but your criticism is dumb. Like EVERYONE, as soon as it comes to iMacs and Mac Minis, reviewers seem to lose their minds and forget that USB3 exists.If you want the config you want, the obvious solution is- buy Fusion mac- add USB3 SSD- create a symlink from ~/Documents (or whatever it is you think you really want to be on SSD) to the USB3 SSD.

I do wish reviews spent less time on this nonsense, criticizing in a desperate attempt to find something to complain about, and spent more time on interesting technical issues. For example- if one creates a 3rd party fusion device via CLI, does it actually engage in this smart transfer of data between SSD and HD? I've seen different claims on the net, and it's not clear to me, if one fuses two USB devices, how the kernel would know that one is SSD and the other is HD.

- can one boot off such a 3rd party fusion device? My instincts would be yes, because one can boot off AppleRAID devices, and this is a later generation of tech, but I've not seen this confirmed. It IS possible that, right now, the mac Mini and iMac have a special version of 10.8.2, and so certain functionalities will not be generally exposed until 10.8.3. If someone has access to an early 10.8.3 release I would, for example, like to see what happens if one takes an older mac mini, and fuses its internal HD with a USB SSD. Can we boot it? Do we get the same sort of data back-and-forth that is described here?

- where in the kernel are the hooks that decide to move data back and forth? If, for example, I create a JBOD of an SSD plus HD (using AppleRaid) I assume I will NOT get this sort of back and forth motion, just the usual Apple hotfile motion. But is that assumption wrong?

- how does Intel's equivalent tech work? In particular, is there actually any HW at all involved (doing what?) or is it just a Windows driver that happens to be written by Intel, and that happens to check you have a particular chipset, before it does all its driver work via the CPU?Reply

- can one boot off such a 3rd party fusion device? My instincts would be yes, because one can boot off AppleRAID devices, and this is a later generation of tech, but I've not seen this confirmed.

To clarify this point.I know that 3rd party CLI-created fusion drives can boot (and we've seen a few descriptions of this in the comments). What is NOT clear to me is whether these 3rd party drives give the full fusion experience, in particular- writes going first to the SSD and- subsequent re-shuffling of data between SSD and HD to match usage patterns.Reply

My personal experience with a "home made" fusion setup in my 3+ year old MacBook Pro is that does seem to be the full fusion experience.

I happen to work from home on an iMac with a 240 GB SSD and a 3 TB hard drive that I manually manage. When I first installed my 1.24 GB fusion drive (1 TB HD + 240 GB SSD) I promptly filled up 500 GB. After that, I used the MBP as my primary workstation for a week on the road. On Monday, system performance was miserable. By Wednesday, my workflow was getting pretty snappy. On Saturday, I switched back to my iMac and was surprised to find that it felt a little slower than the MBP. I have been aching to convert the iMac to fusion drive ever since.Reply

"About the only difference between how I manually organize my data and how Fusion Drive does it is I put my documents and AnandTech folder on my SSD by default. I don’t do this just for performance, but more for reliability. My HDD is more likely to die than my SSD."

So Fusion Drive is essentially a RAID-0. If the spinning drive dies, the whole thing dies. So it doesn't matter how you organize the files. With this, you just let it do its thing and make sure to keep proper backups.

If one of my drives were to die, I'd replace it and restore from backup before doing anything else, anyway!Reply

Under the "Putting Fusion Drive's Performance into Perspective" heading, in the sentence: "In trying to come up with a use case than spanned both drives I und a relatively simple one." I believe that odd word "und" is probably a typo of the word "found".Reply

Yea the biggest nuisance is the lack of 256GB SSD option - either standalone or fusioned.Very very disappointing, and a bog step back from the older iMacs!You think the they improve on their SSD choices, right?

You can't even get a 512 GB one - which is luxurious, but maybe justifiable.

Thank you Anand for this very timely and thorough review. Like many people who have a 1 or 3 fusion drive on order from Apple, this was very eye opening or confirming. The reality is that when you stress a fusion drive, it's going to show it's colors in comparison to a 100% SSD solution. I agree that 256GB would have been more appropriate for the flash portion of this fusion solution. As far as my solution, if this helps anyone contemplating this choice. I have nearly 700GB of Media (music, photos, etc) currently spread between an external HDD and a 500GB HDD internally mounted and my 240GB SSD from OWC usually has 127GB of free space on it while hosting my OSX (2011 Mini). Looking closely at that 110+/-GB of OS "stuff", 62GB User, 28GB Applications, 6.3GB Private, 6.2GB Library, 5.5GB System, and then it tapers off from there into the MB range with use at 776 and then bin at 6.2. While I won't be able to tell exactly what is going onto the fusion or not... it seems to me that a lot of bigger files like iDevice backups, old emails, big apps I never use like iMovie and most of CS will probably be moved by Core Services over to the HDD leaving a lot of space on the flash side of the fusion disk. I can imagine that a good majority of "stuff in that 110GB of data does not really get used day to day. What about my Media? Do I really want a 2012 iMac that has a HDD in it? No! But I got the 3TB fusion because I would rather take the 900$ dollars and invest into a 1TB SSD Thunderbolt solution to keep my media on. Something I can keep if I sell the iMac or put onto my MBA or MBP. So I will take my 700GB of media, put it onto my external SSD and let my system, email, downloads, and day to day stuff run off the 3TB fusion. I also have a lot of storage that I used to keep on my old mac pro that I can now move off my NAS and put back onto my fusion, knowing I won't touch it but once every few months or so. So I can't see how using a 3TB fusion would be any different than having a 768GB given my configuration and storage plan. In fact, I see the fusion with a 1TB external SSD as a superior solution. Good luck to all Reply

I do almost all my work in code (i.e. text) with few graphics. I want to ensure reliability in case of disk failure.

Thus I am considering getting a 2012 Mac mini, opening it up, and adding a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro, in addition to the default 1TB HDD. (The 256GB capacity would allow me a 25+% spare area.) This is my ideal configuration for many reasons.

If I partition the HDD to match the 256GB SSD (leaving ~750MB for random, non-critical data), is it possible to create a RAID 1 array between the SSD and the 256GB HDD partition? (Full backups are made daily.)

In theory, this would allow all the array reads to come from the SSD for fastest response, and still maintain a mirrored HDD that could be booted from should the SSD fail. (If only the HDD partition could be a ZEVO ZFS format! ;-) )

Richard asks: "If I partition the HDD to match the 256GB SSD (leaving ~750MB for random, non-critical data), is it possible to create a RAID 1 array between the SSD and the 256GB HDD partition?"

That's an interesting question. I think the problem would be that there is no "master" disk in a RAID 1 array. Each slice is treated equally. You're hoping that read/write activity would be first served by the faster SSD, with the HD slice catching up in the background on its own time. I don't know that there's any evidence it would work like that, or, putting it another way, that anyone has written a RAID controller to make it happen that way.

It would be interesting to try it out.

We have some Mac Pro towers that I've set up SSD boot/application drives, but we rely on conventional Time Machine backups to an internal HD rather than a RAID mirror.Reply

It is possible to create a RAID 1 in the way you are thinking using AppleRAID.What you want to do is simple enough that you can do it in DIsk Utility using the GUI.If you really insist on going hardcore, hit Terminal and look at diskutil.And you can boot off such an AppleRAID system.

HOWEVER I suspect you will be very unhappy with the results. A system like that can deliver snappy reads (because they'll mostly come from the SSD) but writes will be gated by the HD, and the system will frequently feel an HD system.

It is ALSO possible that you won't even get the read speeds you imagine.When I used AppleRAID in this way (mirroring two HDs) a few years ago, it seemed to me that reads were also slower, and my assumption was that the system, assuming you cared primarily about data correctness (that's why you were mirroring rather than striping), performed both reads and compared the results before passing them up to the file system. Which suggests that your reads will ALSO be gated by the HD performance.

I'm also not sure what problem you believe you are solving with this. SSD failures are simply not that common. You can protect against them using Time Machine. If you REALLY are scared, you can have Time Machine alternate between two (or more) different backup drives.

It seems like a huge amount of pain to solve a problem that barely exists and that can be protected against much better in other ways.Reply

To add to what I said, the AppleRAID mirroring stuff DOES work in terms of reliability, in that if one disk dies, you can just pop it out, replace it, and have the other disk copy to it. But, as I said, you pay a substantial hit in performance for this privilege. Reply

Gaming would have been an interesting 'use' case for the Fusion. When your playing you obviously want the fast access of SSD, but unless its your favourite game, it might not get used much and moved to the HDD.

Also Games being much larger 'applications' would quickly fill the SSD if the Fusion just had a simple 'If App = On SSD" rule.Reply

It's way better to have a proper SSD (most laptops and desktops now have mSATA port) in terms of both performance and cost. Yes, I know that swapping the HDD of any apple device kills the warranty and most apple customers don't know how to upgrade a single component.....Reply

Nope, swapping the HDD with a SSD does not kill the warranty and many Apple users do that (I have done it on a 4 years old Macbook).But if other people find it better to pay for the Fusion solution (and a good solutions it seems to be) good for them.

Thanks, Anand, for the review. It would be interesting to see some comparisons to aftermarket Fusion setups as have been discussed in the comments here. e.g., How does the Fusion arrangement pan out with a 256GB or 512GB SSD on a Mac Mini? If my Mac were not a laptop I'd likely go for a Fusion setup but I'm not willing to take the hit in battery life while running an SSD and HDD (in the optical bay).Reply

I have a 2012 quad 2.3 mini using a 512gb ssd and the oem 1tb hdd. It works very well. I used to run this mini with 2x 512gb ssds in raid0. They were in a pegasus r6 case hooked up via t-bolt. I now run this with the 1.5 tb fusion and a tm plus a clone backup in the thunderbolt case. I prefer the setup this way. I have been doing this for a week I have about 480gb on the 1.5tb fusion . It will take me a while but I will put about 1tb on the fusion I will then see how much it slows.Reply

I have a 2011 Macbook Pro with a 128GB Corsair Force 3 SSD and a 500GB hard disk. I decided to run the commands to make a fusion drive and so far, it's working, although the Force 3 isn't running that fast, despite being set to 6Gbps SATA.

I'm not entirely sure I want to make a Fusion drive on the iMac as well. My current usage is about 500GB, with most of that being music files. On one hand, I have no need for mp3s using up my precious SSD space, even if I listen to them 1000 times a day. On the other, the simplicity of no longer having to worry about the locations of files is very appealing.

I also wonder, if I do a fresh install of Mountain Lion and then re-import my photos, media, etc, will Fusion Drive work better than by migrating over a Time Machine backup, which may fill the SSD with music, but leave apps on the hard disk?Reply

Awesome that Anand can't resist throwing in some sort of enterprise-y benchmarks in a review of a consumer thing. :)

I'm sort of curious how the enterprise caching solutions work on the real-world database-y workloads I've seen AnandTech do measurements of before. That's super workload- and software-dependent (how big is your working set? how fat is your long tail of requests outside it?) so AT's results wouldn't directly apply to the world at large--still, one data point is a big step ahead of zero. :)

(It also seems to be increasingly a thing to design enterprise stuff with data 'intelligently' routed by to SSD or HDD by application-aware software [Evernote has done this, say, and Amazon offers SSDs and HDDs in separate instance types], rather than routing with magic at the block device layer. Still, would be awesome to know anything at all about how effective the automagical caching is in databases.)

And, unrelatedly, I'm sure Apple will get rid of the Pros with HDDs when they can, and I hope most other manufacturers do, too. You don't need TBs of internal storage now (esp. if videos are streamed, cloud storage an cheap externals exist, etc.) and Flash is good for speed, size and weight, durability (no head crashes!), etc.Reply

Performance is incredible, though not quite as fast as my mid-2012 13" MacBook Air with 256 GB SATA III SSD in tests. Here are the results from Xbench 1.3 (the Fusion Drive clocks in at about 2/3 of the performance of the pure SSD, despite having a 3 Gb/s SATA II interface rather than a 6 Gb/s SATA III interface):

I am very happy after 6 weeks with my DIY Fusion Drive in my MBP. Replaced the optical drive as well and moved the HDD 500GB Momentus XT into the DVD HDD tray, and put an Intel330 240GB SSD in. Fused together, it runs really well. I followed the video on Youtube from Tomas Villegas, took me a only a few minutes. Awesome improvement!Reply

Great read, personally I like the thought of getting the Mini with the 256GB SSD + adding another 2-3TB HDD for relatively cheap and using that terminal command to set up the Fusion Drive.

Also Anand, if you're going to be taking screenshots of programs on the Mac: Cmd+Shift+4+(hover over the program you want a screenshot of) then hit the spacebar, you'll get much nicer screenshots. Reply

When (not if) the fusion drive breaks down it is almost impossible to replace it in the new iMac's. But will the SSD part of the fusion drive still work if its only the normal HD part there is broken ?I'm not sure if i should go for the fusion drive or the 256 SSD in a new iMac. I need to fill it up with music applications and i'm not sure if there is space enough in the 256 SSD but I'm sure it will last longer. I don't think you can create a fusion drive with an external HD but is it possible to create some sort of RAID with an external SSD to give me a total 512 SSD HD. At the moment I cant afford the internal 512 SSD but that I think would be the best solution. I need some advice so please help me out here :-)Reply

I've been running a Crucial M4 240GB SSD in my 2007 Macbook Pro for years loving the SSD speed. Then in 2011 I purchased a top-of-the-line 27" iMac with only the 1TB HDD with plans to purchase a ThunderBolt SSD to boot from. However, ThunderBolt SSD's still haven't hit a remotely reasonable pricepoint, so I've been running a 120GB SSD in a FW800 case for a year or so now, and even that was SO MUCH FASTER than using the internal HDD, it seems even adding on FW latency it was still massively faster for everyday use, but I got annoying with using symlinks and folders just being a little strange in Finder...

So I finally got round to changing things... the 128GB boot SSD on the iMac has been moved into the MBP, and the 240GB SSD (from 2008...) was installed inside the iMac and I setup a Fusion Drive with that and the 1TB.

I'm definitely impressed... storage tiering for the consumer that actually works, and works very, very well. This is exactly what I'm after out of a consumer product, excellent performance for 90%+ of my usage, but still with the capacity for my music and iPhoto libraries, most of which are never seen or accessed.

Thanks Anand for doing this review though - I really like reading reviews like this showing real-life usage rather than simply benchmarks.Reply

I took my mid-2010 15" Core i7 MacBook Pro and replaced the optical drive with a 750 GB WD Scorpio Black (using an OWC DataDoubler), and the existing HDD with a 256 GB OCZ Vertex Plus R2 (no meed for anything faster: the machine only has SATA 2), and issued the command line incantations needed to create a fusion drive. The performance gain was incredible: in particular, Microsloth Word launched at about the same speed as on my mid-2012 13" MacBook Air. Repeated the operation with a friend's Core i5 MacBook Pro of the same vintage, but with a Seagate HDD this time, still using the OCZ (it was cheap, and 'good enough'), and again there was a huge performance boost. Basically, in both cases, the CPU is more than adequate for anything routine, three years after manufacture, but the fusion drive upgrades have given us perhaps *another* three years of life for our machines. I fully expect to receive flak for using OCZ drives, but after a year, neither of us has seen problems (possibly because I used slow, commodity OCZ devices that were mature).Reply

I rolled my own Fusion drive in my 2012 2.3ghz quad i7 Mini as well, it only had a 1tb 5400rpm HDD stock in it. I had recently just outright replaced the stock 750gb 7200rpm HD in my 2012 MacBook Pro with a 1tb Samsung EVO (I'll keep the optical drive, for now) so I had this better 7200rpm drive laying around. So I got the kit for the Mini and replaced the stock 1tb 5400rpm drive with the 750gb 7200rpm drive from my MBP and added a 480gb Crucial M550, end result is a 1.22TB fusion drive with a good 16/25 SSD/HDD ratio...it screams...not quite as much as the straight 1tb SSD in my MBP, but is night and day compared to the stock 5400rpm 1tb HDD.Reply